Advance Warning: Website down for 24 hours on January 19th 2013

overscan (PaulMM)

overscan (PaulMM)

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The website will be unavailable for 24 hours on January 19th 2013, This is because our hosting company is moving datacentres from San Jose to Vegas, which will involve teardown, transportation, and setup in the new datacentre.


This is a one-off event, and should give improved network speed and reliability once completed.
 
Apologies - was supposed to post this warning again on Friday but forgot.

The move has been completed. It may take a little time to settle down and further downtime might occur.
 
Server performing slowly after datacenter move

Server is running slow, can't fix until I am at home from work (3 hours or so).
 
There were two more episodes of downtime, 3 hours as you mentioned caused by a breaker circuit failure in the datacentre, then about an hour later on caused by network reconfiguration going bad.

The hosting company underestimated the difficulty of the move and had some bad luck, hopefully things are now sorted.
 
I'm still having intermittent connection issues (over the past 8 hours as I'm writing this), with pages loading either very slowly or not at all, followed by periods of everything working as it should.
 
Hobbes said:
I'm still having intermittent connection issues (over the past 8 hours as I'm writing this), with pages loading either very slowly or not at all, followed by periods of everything working as it should.
Click to expand...

Some similar problems this end.
 
Hmm - its all working perfectly right now for me, but that sounds like a packet loss issue.


If you are on Windows, please try running a command prompt and entering this command:


ping -t www.secretprojects.co.uk


Let it run for 5 mins or so and then press control -c to stop it. Paste the results here like so:



Ping statistics for 209.141.57.69:
Packets: Sent = 1641, Received = 1641, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 144ms, Maximum = 217ms, Average = 168ms
 
Began 1:06PM EST, Ended 1:11PM EST

Ping statistics for 209.141.57.69:
Packets: Sent = 294, Received = 294, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 97ms, Maximum = 188ms, Average = 99ms
 
Accidently left it running for over 20 minutes:

Ping statistics for 209.141.57.69:
Packets: Sent = 933, Received = 881, Lost = 52 (5% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 204ms, Maximum = 488ms, Average = 209ms
 
If you are on Windows, please try running a command prompt and entering this command:

ping -t www.secretprojects.co.uk
Click to expand...
;D ;) B)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr0JaXfKj68
From the movie "The Hunt for Red October", 1990



Code: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jr0JaXfKj68


My results:

Ping statistics for 209.141.57.69:
Packets: Sent = 388, Received = 388, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 23ms, Maximum = 72ms, Average = 27ms
I will try later and tomorrow again. :)
 
Leave it running for some hours if you like. Also if you can do a

tracert www.secretprojects.co.uk

So I can see the network path you take to get to the forum.

Grey Havoc showed 5% packet loss, that would cause issues like you describe where your request to retrieve a page gets lost. Reloading the page then would normally work OK.

If this is correct then the times where the ping times out without reply should correspond with the times the forum misbehaves for you.

I will discuss with the hosting company, possibly could be due to networking issues.
 
Just had another instance where I couldn't reach the forum.


C:\Users\xxx>ping www.secretprojects.co.uk
Ping request could not find host www.secretprojects.co.uk. Please check the name and try again.

A few minutes later, things work ok again:

C:\Users\xxx>ping www.secretprojects.co.uk

Pinging www.secretprojects.co.uk [209.141.57.69] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 209.141.57.69: bytes=32 time=175ms TTL=57
Reply from 209.141.57.69: bytes=32 time=149ms TTL=57
Reply from 209.141.57.69: bytes=32 time=149ms TTL=57
Reply from 209.141.57.69: bytes=32 time=149ms TTL=57

Ping statistics for 209.141.57.69:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 149ms, Maximum = 175ms, Average = 155ms
 
The error message indicates a DNS issue in that you were unable to find the correct IP address for www.secretprojects.co.uk. Otherwise you would have got "timed out" messages from 209.141.57.69


This doesn't make much sense because:


1) Your computer keeps a cache of DNS entries for sites you've visited recently
2) Your ISP keeps a cache of DNS entries for sites anyone of their customers has visited recently
3) There are 4 DNS servers for www.secretprojects.co.uk, so even if you have to look it up, you should always get an answer, and these servers haven't changed in 6 months.



Apparently only half of the network capacity is installed currently in the new datacenter so there might be some network congestion at times, but I can't see how anything at the datacenter could cause a DNS issue.
 

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